Why AWS Supports Valkey

I'm not sure why Redis OSS couldn't live on as open source product, while companies (including Redis Labs) offer managed Redis solutions.

It'd take a lot to get developer adoption and buy in to a separate product that AWS builds themselves, so they adopted Redis. Easy money. It's easier to piggyback on something that won while making lots of money from it and say "well, I helped..." if things chanbge. Then, they chastise the creators as bad people once the gravy train stops.

AWS benefited from hosted redis before contributing. It wasn't adopted out of benevolence. They're still doing it with Memcached, for what its worth.

This just shows you have no idea what sspl entails. It states you can use it for whatever you want, but if you want to provide the product as a service, you need to share all your infrastructure code for providing the service.

Its basically agpl with a carve-out for AWS and that is so valid because AWS are vultures. They probably make the most money in the world from postgres but aren't even in the top 3 contributors[0].

[0] - https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/importance-of-giving-back-...

In reality, the vast majority of commits on Redis in recent history weren't coming from Redis the company (a VC funded entity looking to do an IPO) at all but from the collective users of Redis. Which include such small companies as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. many of whom have a long history of having offered Redis as part of their cloud platforms. Redis was benefiting enormously from these contributions. The notion that VCs somehow own this codebase and are the victim of other public companies abusing their intellectual property is nonsensical.

They unilaterally created a fork of the up until then open source code base that all these companies have been contributing to. This is completely legal under the BSD license and they are well within their rights to do so. Just like every other user of Redis. Including the before mentioned large software companies. But unlike Redis, they continue to contribute to the open source code base and share the code. It's Redis that has turned all greedy and capitalist here, not AWS. Redis never paid AWS for their contributions. Or Google. Or Microsoft. That's how open source works.

This developer community is of course continuing to work on the various forks that they already had (for the purpose of developing and contributing back changes) and will continue to share code with each other. Why would they stop doing that? Nominally, Valkey, which has been created under the Linux Foundation seems to be emerging as the dominant shared fork used for that. AWS is merely announcing that they indeed plan to rally behind that one.

It's logical, sensible, and completely consistent with what they have been doing for many years, which is to offer a Redis/Valkey based service to their users and collaborate with other users and companies on the open source code base. I expect more announcements from the vast majority of companies using redis in the next weeks. The only thing that changed is that Redis the company cut themselves loose from that ecosystem. Most of the code and business was never theirs. They owned neither the copyright nor the moral rights to any of that.

What happened here is not that AWS and Valkey forked Redis. Rather, Redis forked itself into a closed system and Valkey et al are picking up the torch of the open source project.